A Kerry Landslide?

Over the last year, most political TV shows handicapping the upcoming presidential election have repeated the refrain that the race will be extremely tight. Last month, CNN's astute commentator Jeff Greenfield hosted an entire segment on how easily this election could turn out like 2000, with President Bush and Sen. John Kerry splitting victories in the popular vote and the electoral college. Greenfield even threw out the possibility of an electoral college split of 269-269, brought about by a shift of just two swing states that went for Bush last time, New Hampshire, and West Virginia. He ended his feature with the conventional wisdom among Washington pundits: "We're assuming this election will stay incredibly close." Reporters covering the campaign echo this expectation, sprinkling their campaign dispatches with references to the "closely fought" electoral race and "tight election." The campaign staffs themselves have been saying for months that they anticipate that the race will go down to the wire. In late April, Republican party chairman Ed Gillespie told The New York Times that he expected a "very, very close" race. This winter, Democratic party chairman Terry McAuliffe urged Ralph Nader not to enter the race, fearing that the perpetual candidate could take precious votes away from Kerry in a race sure to be won by a hairline margin.

There are perfectly understandable reasons why we expect 2004 to be close. Everyone remembers the nail-biting 2000 recount. A vast number of books and magazine articles describe the degree to which we are a 50/50 nation and detail the precarious balance between red and blue states. And poll after poll show the two candidates oscillating within a few percentage points of one another. There are also institutional factors that drive the presumption that the race will be tight. The press wants to cover a competitive horse-race. And the last thing either campaign wants to do is give its supporters any reason to be complacent and stay home on election day.

But there's another possibility, one only now being floated by a few political operatives: 2004 could be a decisive victory for Kerry. The reason to think so is historical. Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins. If you look at key indicators beyond the neck-and-neck support for the two candidates in the polls--such as high turnout in the early Democratic primaries and the likelihood of a high turnout in November--it seems improbable that Bush will win big. More likely, it's going to be Kerry in a rout.

In the last 25 years, there have been four elections which pitted an incumbent against a challenger--1980, 1984, 1992, and 1996. In all four, the victor won by a substantial margin in the electoral college. The circumstances of one election hold particular relevance for today: 1980. That year, the country was weathering both tough economic times (the era of "stagflation"--high inflation concurrent with a recession) and frightening foreign policy crises (the Iranian hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). Indeed, this year Bush is looking unexpectedly like Carter. Though the two presidents differ substantially in personal style (one indecisive and immersed in details, the other resolute but disengaged), they are also curiously similar. Both are religious former Southern governors. Both initially won the presidency by tarring their opponents (Gerald Ford, Al Gore) with the shortcomings of their predecessors (Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton). Like Carter, Bush is vulnerable to being attacked as someone not up to the job of managing impending global crises.

Everyone expected the 1980 election to be very close. In fact, Reagan won with 50.8 percent of the popular vote to Carter's 41 percent (independent John Anderson won 6.6 percent)--which translated into an electoral avalanche of 489 to 49. The race was decided not so much on the public's nascent impressions of the challenger, but on their dissatisfaction with the incumbent.

Nor was Carter's sound defeat an aberration. Quite the opposite. Of the last five incumbent presidents booted from office--Bush I, Carter, Ford, Herbert Hoover, and William Howard Taft--only one was able to garner over 200 electoral votes, and three of these defeated incumbents didn't even cross the 100 electoral-vote threshold: --1992: 370 (Bill Clinton) to 168 (George H. W. Bush) --1980: 489 (Ronald Reagan) to 49 (Jimmy Carter) --1976: 297 (Jimmy Carter) to 240 (Gerald Ford) --1932: 472 (FDR) to 59 (Herbert Hoover) --1912: 435 (Woodrow Wilson) to 88 (TR) to 8 (Taft)

Historically, when incumbents lose big, they do so for sound reasons: The public sees their policies as not working--or worse yet, as failures. That's certainly increasingly true of Bush today. From the chaos in Iraq to an uncomfortably soft economic recovery to the passage of an unpopular Medicare bill, the White House is having a harder and harder time putting a positive spin on the effects of the president's decisions.

And while Bush still retains a loyal base, he has provoked--both by his policies and his partisanship--an extremely strong reaction among Democrats. One indication is that turnout in this year's early Democratic primaries was way up. Nearly twice as many Democrats turned out for the 2004 Iowa caucuses as they had for those held in 2000. The turnout in New Hampshire for the Democratic primary was also extraordinarily high, up 29 percent from the previous turnout record set in 1992--the year Bush's father lost his reelection bid.

The Democrats' recent enthusiasm at the polls may in part be because this year's primary featured nine candidates, and Howard Dean's unusual campaign mobilized many new voters--both for and against him. However, the excitement in the Democratic race can't explain primary voter behavior on the other side of the aisle. Republican turnout in the New Hampshire primary was lower than in 2000, but that isn't surprising considering that Bush's nomination was never in question this year. A fairer way to gauge the eagerness of the president's base to rally behind him is to compare this GOP primary to the last one that featured an incumbent running for reelection with no real primary opposition: Bill Clinton in 1996. That year in New Hampshire, 76,874 Democrats cast ballots for Clinton. This year, 53,749 Republicans cast ballots for Bush. This is especially astonishing, considering that, in New Hampshire, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats.

The most obvious evidence cutting against the historical trend of elections featuring incumbents being won or lost by large margins is that opinion polls have consistently shown Bush and Kerry running neck and neck. But look carefully, and you'll find a couple of nuances in the most recent poll data that point to the potential for a big Kerry win. First, in polls that implicitly assume a higher turnout, Kerry performs better than he does in other polls. Most of the polls you hear about--and the ones that prognosticators trust the most--are surveys of "likely voters." Among the criteria pollsters typically use to identify likely voters is whether the subjects participated in the last election. These polls have proven more accurate in recent elections, like 2000, when voter turnout was relatively low--of the last nine presidential elections, only two showed lower turnout than 2000. But there are strong reasons to think that voters will turn out in larger numbers this year--especially among Democrats.

Four years ago, when the economy was strong, the country wasn't at war, and both presidential candidates ran as moderates, just 43 percent of adults told an early April Gallup poll that they had been thinking about the election "quite a lot." This April, when the issues seem much bigger and the differences between the candidates much starker, Gallup found that 61 percent of adults said they had been giving "quite a lot" of thought to the election.

So, presuming higher turnout, an arguably better predictor of election results would be polls of registered voters--both those who voted and those who stayed home in 2000. In an early April Gallup poll, Kerry trailed Bush 46 percent to 48 percent among likely voters, but led 48 percent to 46 percent among registered voters. Kerry's support had dropped incrementally in a late April Gallup poll, but he continued to garner higher support among registered voters than likely voters.

The second nuance to look at is what political consultant Chris Kofinis calls "the Bush bubble": the gap between the president's overall approval ratings and his approval ratings on specific policy areas. According to the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, Bush's approval rating now stands at 51 percent. That isn't bad, though it is noticeably below what the last two incumbents who won reelection had at this point in the election cycle: Reagan's approval was 54 percent and Clinton's was 56 percent. But even Bush's 51 percent may be softer than it looks. In the same poll, on seven of nine major policy issues--the economy, Iraq, Social Security, health insurance, taxes, jobs, the deficit--less than half of respondents said that they approved of the president's performance. In several cases, his approval was well below 50 percent. Only 45 percent approved of Bush's handling of Iraq; 44 percent of his performance on the economy; 34 percent of his performance on the deficit; and 33 percent of his stewardship of Social Security. Even on policy areas in which the president's approval is now relatively high--education and the war on terror--he is vulnerable to later substantive attacks by Kerry. For instance, he currently garners 51 percent approval on education, due largely to his role in passing a bold education measure; increasingly, however, educators and the public are alarmed about the effects of No Child Left Behind.

Of course, the tight polling data does reflect a fundamental reality: For all the fallout from his policies, Bush still appeals to many Americans because of his seeming decisiveness, straight talk, and regular-guy charm--not qualities that John Kerry prominently displays. The historical pattern may strongly suggest that if Kerry wins, it will be by large margins--but that is hardly fated. It will only happen if Kerry successfully highlights Bush's failings while showing himself to be an appealing alternative. Otherwise, the senator could see himself losing an electoral rout, not winning in one. In fact, the second most likely outcome of this election is a Bush landslide. With just one exception, every president to win a second consecutive term has done so with a larger electoral margin than his initial victory. The least likely result this November is another close election.

Right now, the president is vulnerable. As The New Republic's Ryan Lizza argued in a recent New York Times editorial, undecided voters "know [the incumbent] well, and if they were going to vote for him, they would have already decided. Thus support for Mr. Bush should be seen more as a ceiling, while support for Mr. Kerry, the lesser-known challenger, is more like a floor."

That points to both an opportunity and a challenge for the Kerry campaign. Kerry needs to convince voters that he's up to the job--and that Bush isn't. If he can woo voters dissatisfied with Bush's policies, there's a potential--and historical precedent--for Kerry to win big.

This lying POS, Todd, is another example of how insane the lunatic lefties in the media are!

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1129958/posts

Welcome To The Post-Bias Media
TCS ^ | 5/5/04 | Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

Posted on 05/05/2004 7:00:10 AM PDT by ZGuy

There's been a curious pattern of "me too-ism" visible on the left recently. Al Gore is launching a liberal cable TV channel to compete with Fox News. Al Franken launched Air America, his nascent liberal talk radio network, to compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and other conservatives with successful national talk shows.

And then there's Media Matters. On Sunday, The New York Times announced the formation of a two million dollar think tank to research and prove the influence of the right on the media. As Andrew Sullivan noted in his Weblog, the Times' article was one of the stranger stories on media bias in a long time. It dusted off the claims that the media lean towards the right that Al Gore and others tried to float in November of 2002. The left created this meme to explain away that year's mid-term election results, when Republicans kept their hold on the House and regained the Senate after losing it in May of 2001, when Vermont's "Jumpin'" Jim Jeffords switched allegiances.

Of course, there were some other curious elements to the Times' story. First, the project is headed by David Brock, who not only did a little jumping of his own in the mid-1990s, ditching the conservative American Spectator magazine and becoming a committed man of the left. Second, Brock told the Times that he hopes that Media Matters will replicate the success of the Media Research Center, which for almost 17 years has documented the leftward tilt of the media. But as James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal wrote on Monday, "See the problem here? Brock's new shop is devoted to faulting conservative opinion journalists for expressing conservative opinions. What the Media Research Center does is entirely different; it analyzes liberal bias in the news media, which are supposed to be objective."

Another strange thing has started happening as well -- in the past, media elites denounced any claims of a liberal bias in the news with a shrug and a "who, us? We're not liberals. We're not leftwing. We're objective and neutral. No biases here!" More and more, as we'll shortly see, the media are going on the record (Brock, Gore and Franken, notwithstanding) that it leans pretty heavily towards the left.

Changing The Landscape

This new topsy-turvy world may have been ushered in by Bernard Goldberg, the author of two best-selling books, Bias and Arrogance. Goldberg built on the still ongoing spadework by the Media Research Center to document the leftward tilt of the media. Then the Blogosphere essentially had its grand opening on September 11th, when several million Americans who couldn't log onto the Websites of CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, instead began checking out alternatives whose servers weren't blown out from too much traffic. These newcomers to the Blogosphere stayed there, and often put down roots themselves, as the media trotted out its clichés of Quagmire! Failure! Evil imperialism! The brutal Afghan winter! Remember the Soviets!

Shortly thereafter, in December of 2001, Goldberg released his first book, Bias. When I spoke to him in early April of 2004, he told me, that coming from a liberal journalist who had been in the media since 1967, first with CBS, and now HBO, "I think that Bias made the issue far more mainstream than it was before. I think that before that, the complaints came from almost exclusively from conservative places, like talk radio and the Media Research Center.

"In the beginning when the book came out", Goldberg adds, "media elites ignored it. Then, when they couldn't ignore it, because it hit The New York Times' bestseller list, some of them got incredibly nasty and mean spirited, and personal."

How nasty? Michael Kinsley described Bias as "this dumb book." The Washington Post's Tom Shales called Goldberg a "disgruntled has-been." And those were some of their more polite phrases. "But by doing all that," Goldberg says, "there was such a buzz that the subject couldn't be ignored anymore. Peter Jennings was talking about it, and Dan Rather was talking about it, and Tom Brokaw was talking about it, and the editor of the LA Times was talking about it, and the new editor of the New York Times was talking about it."

And the subject of media bias was out of the bottle in a way that it hadn't been before, Goldberg says. "I take no credit, by the way, for it being out there, except that I caught up with the American people. It was always out there, but it was not out there coming from a mainstream journalist, who had never been accused by his one employer of 28 years of having a bias -- not once.

"That's what I think changed the landscape."

2004: A Post-Bias Odyssey

So let's survey media bias in the post-Bias world. The first big difference is a real sea change in how the media discusses the subject. In the past, any claims of bias were responded to with lines such as those Lesley Stahl tried to sell Cal Thomas on Fox News with in early January of 2003, when she said, "I don't know of anybody's political bias at CBS News. I really think we try very hard to get any opinion that we have out of our stories, and most of our stories are balanced." Or as Howell Raines said the following month (only a few months before he resigned as the editor of The New York Times), "Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and that strives to be independent of undue commercial or governmental influence."

But after Bias was released, and after the first round of the media's Scud missile attacks against Goldberg, something remarkable happened. Journalists have started going on the record that they -- and their employers -- are biased.

Andy Rooney on Larry King Live in June of 2002 may have been the first when he said, "I'm consistently liberal in my opinions," and that he considers Dan Rather to be "transparently liberal." (Rooney's quotes later framed Goldberg's introduction to Arrogance, his 2003 book.)

In May of 2003, according to CNSNews.com, Bob Zelnick, who spent 21 years at ABC News, "confirmed fellow former ABC News correspondent Peter Collins' contention that anchor Peter Jennings routinely attempted to insert his left of center editorial slant into correspondents' news copy."

In August of 2003, Walter Cronkite added, "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal." (Does Lesley Stahl know this?)

And then ABC's "The Note" Weblog on February 10th of this year basically gave the game away in detail:

"Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

"They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are "conservative positions."

"They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation's problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don't have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories."

True, Dan Rather and Ted Koppel aren't going to appear on their respective shows tomorrow and say that they're planning on pulling the levers on the D-column of the voting booth at their local Manhattan polls, but after Goldberg's book, enough elderly, retired, or mid-level people are now willing to explain the rules the game for people who will listen.

Who Watches the Watchers?

And the people who are listening are Webloggers and other Web-based journalists who are recording this stuff for posterity. In the past, when someone like Andy Rooney went on Larry King's show, a comment like his was usually heard by the million or so who tuned into King's show, and then lost forever into the ionosphere, on its way towards the alien races in Contact and Galaxy Quest who tune in nightly to planet Earth's reruns.

But today, quotes such as Rooney's have a new audience: the Blogosphere, which is doing some of the investigative and analytical work that big media used to do in its heyday: the scandals that erupted when Senators Trent Lott and Christopher Dodd each apparently made racist comments began in similar fashions: each statement was first broadcast on C-Span (which in a way can be considered a new medium itself), picked up by astute bloggers, then by talk radio, and only then by TV news.

"If there's a problem besides bias with the evening news," Goldberg says, "it's a lack of intelligence. The reporters are intelligent -- that's not the problem. The news is not intelligent: they squeeze it into a minute and a half. They don't know anything about outsourcing, yet they do pieces about outsourcing. They do pieces on unemployment, but they no nothing about productivity problems.

"It's an unintelligent medium. With the best places on the Web, you can read things and say, 'Wow, I didn't know that! Why didn't I know that?!' Because you're not getting it if you watch the mainstream networks for your information."

Most of the folks who inhabit the Blogosphere are enlightened amateurs who have found that researching the media and politicians and yelling "gotcha!" when they're catch them lying can be tremendously rewarding when it's done right. As Roger Ailes once told Matt Drudge, "you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair."

But despite the work being done on the 'Net, Goldberg has mixed thoughts on the newest medium. "There are things on the Web that are totally irresponsible, more so than in the mainstream media; far more so. Far more so. But the best places on the Web offer the kind of journalism that you don't get from the evening news."

Lesley's Missing Question

One thing the 'Net has been particularly useful for is giving analysis and background on the recent 9/11 hearings. According to Goldberg, that's more than CBS can say:

"60 Minutes devoted 26 minutes to that interview with Richard Clarke, and they didn't have one question on the air -- not one -- where Lesley Stahl said to him, 'well, what about the Clinton administration?'

"Not one. They have a sound bite with a guy from the Bush administration saying 'we were in office 230 days before September 11th, and the Clinton administration was in office for eight years before September 11th,' and there was no follow up of that. They didn't go back to Richard Clarke and say, 'what about that?'

"I'm not even saying that's biased. But I'm saying that was incredibly bad journalism. And then I read a review of Clarke's book in The Wall Street Journal, and it is chock full of facts that Lesley Stahl obviously didn't know anything about, because if she had, she would have asked some decent questions.

"I think that what the media did with the Clarke thing, is that they just picked up on his criticism of President Bush, which I think is absolutely legitimate, and they didn't do anything else. They didn't analyze if he was right or wrong, and they didn't wonder very much about whether or not he went too easy on the previous administration. Because it's not as though nothing happened during those eight years. There was the bombing of the World Trade Center, there was the bombing of the Cole, there was the bombing of Khobar Towers, and there was the bombing of the Embassy in Africa. And there's not a single question in 26 minutes?! That's incredible! Whether or not it was biased, it was disgraceful journalism."

In Part II, we'll look at Goldberg's thoughts on liberal talk radio, how the media has covered the presidential race, and more of his thoughts on the post-Bias media.

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